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By Steven & Amy

Children Need to be Children First

Children need the opportunity to explore the outside world. They have the rest of their life to learn via screens and to become dependent on technology.

"Honoring children’s innate developmental processes seems to be especially difficult in the
United States, where we like things to be faster and bigger than normal." (Tech Tonic, 71).

"Many parents want to give their children a competitive edge in the world,but do so at a price." (Tech Tonic, 71).

"For young children, make-believe play is particularly important, starting around age two
or three, when children begin to try on all the aspects of life they experience. Through
play they get to know themselves and the world around them." (Tech Tonic, 74).


Credible Quotes


The following quotes may be of interest to any duo trying to raise their children from seed. If the ideologies and disciplines pertaining to the cycle of nature indeed correspond to human life, then these credible quotes highlight the importance.

In Stephen Talbott's book, the Future Does Not Compute, a father tells a story when he recalls, "Yesterday my 11-year-old son and I were hiking in a remote wood. He was leading." [Already we can stop there, and take notice to of the situation. This father chooses to take his son into wilderness, and give him the leaders torch. The father goes on to open up,] "He spotted [a] four-foot rattlesnake in the trail about six feet in front of us. we watched it for quite some time before going around it." [The father does something here. He takes a while to observe something in nature, instead of just rushing by. The father continues to make known,] "when we were on the way home, he commented that this was the best day of his life. The father went on "to wonder how many armchair nature-watchers have seen dangerous snakes on the tube and said, 'this is the best day of my life.' (Tech Tonic, 87)

Another notable quotable would be from David Abram, as he says, "the palpable, sensuous world that materially surrounds us draws us into relationship with a diversity of beings as inscrutable and unfathomable as ourselves." He adds: "Let us indeed celebrate the powers of technology and introduce our children to the digital delights of our era. But not before we have acquainted them with the
gifts of the living land, and enabled its palpable mysteriesto ignite their imaginations and their thoughts. Not before we have stepped outside with our children, late at night, to gaze up at the glinting lights scattered haphazard through the fathomless dark, and sharing a story about how those stars came to be there (Tech Tonic, 76).

While it is easy to neglect our responsibilities as life givers and invest in technologies that lend a hand to rearing, these quotes show the reader that life, and especially childhood is a discipline. The children who do not become disciplined in life may not hold the understanding proper for procreative life.




Reference

Alliance for Childhood (2004). Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology. College Park, MD:Alliance for Childhood.